They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.
Well I may have got a bit carried away with all this, I have indeed started to build my own map from scratch.
It is still a WIP at the moment but I have the coast of England and Wales completed and it all seems to line up pretty well, not perfect of course but a lot better than the stock map.
So You are pretty much showing over water on the map when you are over water, and over land when over land!
I've drawn this by a rather, er, intensive method, of flying the whole coastline in game taking screenshots.
The attached images show where I'm at so far, note Ireland/Eire and France are not improved in any way and I'm in the process of marking urban areas and not sure yet if I will perhaps just use point references for most of them instead of shading, also there are no forests marked and only minmal inland water bodies.
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Starting to add some cities, also inland water bodies, and have done most of the French coast from Normandy to Belgium
I'm keeping an eye out to see if a new map affects game performance, seems ok so far, but detail is low at the moment. Hopefully this won't scupper the whole exercise later.
I'm also trying a different map size and zoom levels for the inflight view.
Here (attached) is the latest map in the briefing view and also in flight.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.
I'm not sure it is ...to be honest I'm not that clear in understanding resolutions, pixels and the like. It currently is larger in pixel dimensions at the moment, but, my main aim is to get navigational features lined up with the in game experience. This is definitely working enough from using my WIP map when playing the game. When I've also set the zoom to 52000 or 64000 and removed the own aircraft icon it means even though the map is centred on the player it can ' force' me to successfully navigate using outside features.
I've also played around with colour schemes and seen that this can soften the apparent pixelated appearance by having shades that blend more, but for now am just focusing on layout.
This may end up a waste of my time, but it seems to be creating something useful in my experience so far.
Having flown over so much of the map it has dawned on me just how huge, and impressive it is. The details may be repeated but I've seen few glitches and it is quite charming sometimes, the position of remote houses and churches etc.
If it works better it will be something others will find useful so shouldn't be a waste of time. I am sure now you see the challenge involved in getting a good map as we do not have the map chopped into bits you fly in a bubble with "boundaries" as you do in most other sims. It pretty much covers the England to the Swiss border - and with enough fuel you could fly most of the way in 1 go.
After trying a few things and a bit of consideration, I am going to move over to doing it in a higher resolution straight away, rather than do a low res one first.
Yep the strip of map at the top I don't believe exists in the game... for example if I select either the Isle of man airbase or the most Northernly one in England in QMB, or try to fly up there in game my game crashes, is that not the same for everyone? I was considering adding some text or something on there to make it look like a real map but not until the end of mapping.
And my plan was to list countries and main cities like the default map does, (and real maps of course), more for flavour than use... although if you reularly see a place in games on a map it is nice to get used to it, especially when you may fly over in future. But yes, I'll look at versions with and without labels in future it si very easy to leave them off when genereating the file.
Yep the strip of map at the top I don't believe exists in the game... for example if I select either the Isle of man airbase or the most Northernly one in England in QMB, or try to fly up there in game my game crashes, is that not the same for everyone? I was considering adding some text or something on there to make it look like a real map but not until the end of mapping.
Interesting. The area appears to be included in the stock map... I suppose it's included there because you might 'see' past the edge of the world, even if you can't fly there (as in my flight to Cottam). Maybe the missing strip could be filled in crudely, simply by tracing the coastline from the stock map?
Yep the strip of map at the top I don't believe exists in the game... for example if I select either the Isle of man airbase or the most Northernly one in England in QMB, or try to fly up there in game my game crashes, is that not the same for everyone? I was considering adding some text or something on there to make it look like a real map but not until the end of mapping.
Interesting. The area appears to be included in the stock map... I suppose it's included there because you might 'see' past the edge of the world, even if you can't fly there (as in my flight to Cottam). Maybe the missing strip could be filled in crudely, simply by tracing the coastline from the stock map?
Fair point, I'll see how it goes, again, it wouldn't be too much hassle to do alternative versions.
